earthfamilyalpha

With the advent of advanced global communication, new forms of social contract can be created which transcend the geographic state. These new cybercoops or cyberstates will bring humankind to higher levels of cooperation and understanding.

Friday, April 29, 2005

The Legacy Thing

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,And on the pedestal these words appear:"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley1792-1822

The time has come to speak of Legacy.

There are many definitions, most speak of a "gift left to future generations."

Legacy is that which endures when the person is gone. Legacy endures longer than memory.

Legacy is the history you write for yourself. You can change your Legacy every day you live.

Then others will dissect it and report it for you.

Legacy is the accumulated and resulting meme of one's objective, historical record.

But there is a young journalist today playing an interesting dual role in the realm of Legacy today. His name is Dahr Jamail, and he is an "unembedded" journalist reporting out of Iraq. His frank and honest reporting of what he has seen in that country is moving, even shocking, and certainly important. On one hand, Jamail is establishing his own legacy. At the same time, his reporting threatens to recast the POTUS' legacy as well.

Starting wars, whether you lose them or win them, is a good way to build a Legacy.

Luckily, not too many people really get the chance to start a war.

We don't think of war building anything. But wars can build. They build a record of words. They build a record of images (caution: graphic images). They build a hope that if we read the record, we might once and for all realize that war really is hell.

National leaders are expected to "leave a Legacy." The current POTUS claims not to care about his Legacy.

Pity.

Since you have a chance to leave a Legacy, and famous people have even more likelihood of being said to leave a Legacy, it really seems that everyone of us should try to leave the best Legacy we can.

I am sitting in a room full of agriculture sector folks and renewable energy folks. The place is awash in thoughts of Legacy. Farmers wondering if they will be able to pass their farming Legacy to their children. Renewable energy folks wondering if they will leave a Legacy of a cleaner energy future--and whether the farmers will help them.

In Washington, D.C., the POTUS wants to leave his own Legacy. He called for a Legacy of nuclear power; of refineries on abandoned military bases; of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve; of tax breaks for diesel cars; of liquified natural gas terminals.

Here is an idea more in track with my own thoughts:

"The right of citizens of the United States to use and enjoy air, water, wildlife, and other renewable resources determined by the Congress to be common property shall not be impaired, nor shall such use impair their availability for the use of future generations."

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Faith Based Economics

I spent the afternoon with a former banker friend of mine.

He was one of those guys that you would see on the TV all the time back in the 80s and even in the 90s. He had this great office with a power view from the top floor of the building that had his banks name on it. We were talking about the future and the future of the dollar of course.

To understand the case for deflation we must turn back the hands of time.The year is 1914. WWI was breaking out in Europe and the US stayed out of it for three years. As a result of being a "safe haven" gold poured into the United States and US gold reserves rose 64% as Europe exchanged its gold for American goods.

By the time the US entered the war much of Europe was ravaged. The US escaped unharmed. After the war ended the US trade surplus remained high and allies began repaying their war debts.The US experienced rapid credit expansion as a result of the surge in gold reserves. Between 1914 and 1920 the US doubled its expansion of credit. During those war years, investment in machinery and equipment rose by 205% and the value of durable goods output increased in excess of 250%

This surge in capacity led to general oversupply of goods by 1926. During the second half of the "roaring 20's" credit expanded at moderate rate but the damage had already been done. The economy was no longer able to profitably invest in equipment so increasing amounts of money poured into the stock markets. The bubble finally burst in 1929 when profit growth (earnings) could not keep pace with rising stock market valuations. Share prices plunged, credit contracted, and bankruptcies proliferated.

Now leap to the present situation:

"Wrong-Way Greenspan"

We are now in period of what might be called "pseudo-inflation" since it is an unsustainable mirage. Inflation is there alright. How can one deny the expansion of credit, absurd home prices, a re-inflated stock market bubble, and irrational exuberance in properties exhibited by "flipping houses"? Greenspan and the FED fueled this boom by attempting to defeat the deflationary business cycle. All this did was fuel an enormous expanse of credit that went into property values just as happened in the late 1980's in Japan.

The hopes of this FED was that 1% interest rates would fuel a jobs boom. It did, but NOT where the FED wanted it. There was a jobs boom but it was in China not the US.

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- China has lost faith in the stability of the U.S. dollar and its first priority is to broaden the exchange rate for its currency from the dollar to a more flexible basket of currencies, a top Chinese economist said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum.

At a standing-room only session focusing on the world's fastest-growing economy, Fan Gang, director of the National Economic Research Institute at the China Reform Foundation, said the issue for China isn't whether to devalue the yuan but "to limit it from the U.S. dollar."But he stressed that the Chinese government is under no pressure to revalue its currency.

China's exchange rate policies restrict the value of the yuan to a narrow band around 8.28 yuan, pegged to $1. Critics argue that the yuan is undervalued, making China's exports cheaper overseas and giving its manufacturers an unfair advantage. Beijing has been under pressure from its trading partners, especially the United States, to relax controls on its currency.

"The U.S. dollar is no longer -- in our opinion is no longer -- (seen) as a stable currency, and is devaluating all the time, and that's putting troubles all the time," Fan said, speaking in English."So the real issue is how to change the regime from a U.S. dollar pegging ... to a more manageable ... reference ... say Euros, yen, dollars -- those kind of more diversified systems," he said."

If you do this, in the beginning you have some kind of initial shock," Fan said. "You have to deal with some devaluation pressures."

Now as the banker and I talked, he seemed to come in on the side of Mr. Mish, and the need to hold cash, probably as Euros. I suggested that if the market is priced right now, a declining dollar would result in a higher market and perhaps even higher real estate values. I would also borrow lots of money if I didn't need it and leverage it to buy these equities.

Finally, bye-bye to America, if the Neo-cons surrounding Bush, talk him into considering such a scenario as an act of war. The itchy nuclear trigger-fingers that Russia will have over their sense of impending loss of sales of their oil and natural gas reserves will be obvious.I've been saying for years - watch China in regard to petro-dollars. That's the #1 economic indicator as a prelude to a new world war.Economic analysis kind of goes out the window when a real warstarts.

China is going around the world doing the American thing setting up oil purchase arrangements with Venezuela, with Canada, and with Iran..

The US is using its military in the Middle East doing the Empire thing.

If both countries came together to bring about an advanced solar hydrogen economy, we could avoid war, depression, and a probable die off of world population.

Instead of racing around the globe finding the last drops of oil to protect the petro-dollar, we could be waging peace and defending the planet.

Instead of worrying about our investments, we could be feeding and powering the world in a sustainable and humane fashion.

"In their coverage of the death of Marla Ruzicka, an activist conducting a door-to-door survey of civilian casualties in Iraq who was killed by a suicide bomber on April 16, network news programs failed to note that her research apparently contradicts the Pentagon's repeated claims that it does not track civilian deaths.

A Pentagon official reportedly leaked some casualty figures compiled by the Defense Department to Ruzicka, who founded the Campaign for Innocent Civilians In Conflict (CIVIC) and advocated the official release of all such figures.

But in reporting on Ruzicka's work on April 17, ABC News correspondent John Bermanfailed to note that she directly contradicted the Pentagon's claim that it does not keep track of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. ."

The Washington Post reported that "Pentagon officials say they do not keep tallies of civilian casualties" [10/29/04]. Similarly, retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, declared in March 2002: "We don't do body counts."

Yet other news reports suggest that the Pentagon does in fact track civilian casualties, a discrepancy that ABC and other media outlets failed to note in their coverage of Ruzicka's death.

Amongst all of the reporting and all of the clatter about how good she was, I have found that the purpose of her work, to determine how many deaths actually occurred, has rarely been mentioned and even more rarely enumerated.

Those numbers are here in this piece by Trudy Rubin in the Buffalo News.

"Civilian casualties are an inconvenient stain on the story line of Iraq liberation. The Iraqi wedding party bombed by mistake; the small girl shot dead by U.S. fire aimed next door; the family killed by nervous American soldiers at a checkpoint - all are often dismissed as unavoidable collateral damage.

U.S. officials don't give out any official figures on such deaths.

That leads to rampant speculation about numbers. Last October, the London-based medical publication the Lancet contended there were 100,000 civilian deaths as direct or indirect consequence of the Iraq invasion; this figure seems an exaggeration.

The www.iraqbodycount.net project suggested just under 17,000 as of late 2004, based on deaths reported in the news media. There is no question that many thousands have died.

Iraqis can apply to the U.S. military for compensation, but the process is often arbitrary. If the death is deemed to be "combat-related," no payment is made."

And the actual reporting by news organizations on the violent event itself is virtually nonexistent, probably because no one knows what really happened.

It's still unclear exactly how Marla and her driver, Faiz, were killed. But early reports indicate that they were traveling on the dangerous route between Baghdad and the airport when a suicide car bomber tried to attack a military convoy. Faiz was an Iraqi Airways pilot, who at one time worked as an interpreter for Monitor correspondents in Iraq.

"The U.S. Embassy is investigating and hasn't been able to determine if the attack was a suicide mission or a bomb that was remotely detonated, the official said.

It's also unknown whether Ruzicka's vehicle was associated with a three-car convoy of a U.S. nongovernmental organization, National Democratic Institute, that was traveling along the same road, the official added. That convoy may have been the target of the attack."

"On Saturday April 16, our colleague and friend, 28-year-old Marla Ruzicka of Lakeport, California, was killed when a car bomb exploded on the streets of Baghdad. We still dont know the exact details of her death, which makes it all that much harder to deal with the utter shock of losing this bright, shining light whose work focused on trying to bring some compassion into the middle of a war zone. "

And just to add more pathos, there is this kind of stufffrom the right.

"Although the MSM, her organization, her friends and family seem to want to spin her death as being "accidental," she didn't die from cross fire or from some errant suicide bomber - she died as the result of the actions of a homicide bomber, period. In other words, friendly(for Marla) fire!

Although I've got no problem with helping the innocent victims of war, the Marlas of the world somehow always fault the U.S. with the death of innocents, and never the terrorists, the insurgents, or the "freedom fighters" that are in fact, none of these things, they are just plain old vanilla - mindless and evil killers."

Corporate Psychos

THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture, advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, illuminates the corporation's grip on our lives. Taking its legal status as a "person" to its logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" Provoking, witty, sweepingly informative, The Corporation includes forty interviews with corporate insiders and critics - including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

And there is no reason to get all high and mighty about it, because I imagine that if we as individuals could act with impunity, we probably would behave pretty badly. We still act pretty bad knowing we might go to prison or wherever.

Making corporations accountable means taking their charter away and selling their assets if they have behaved recklessly. It means holding directors criminally accountable if the case and misdeeds merit such punishment.

If we have the death penalty for real people, we should definitely have it for legal creations too. In fact, I would say we have it exactly backward right now. Go rob a bank in Texas, and shoot and kill the teller and see what you get. Poison the air with your chemicals from your products, and thus kill untold thousands, and you get a fine.

A while back, I was leading a discussion group on sustainability on a TV show. I must admit, I did have this pretty well planned. The last question was, "how do we get to where we need to go?". I had the director start with a three button shot and move in as I gave my clear and understandable argument for Corporate Capital Punishment. At the end, I was closing my argument with a full face closeup looking right into the camera like a Pentecostal Preacher giving an altar call.

It must have worked pretty well, because a few weeks later, the co- producer of the show told me that they actually received hate mail because of my comments. I guess there were a few out there in TV land who felt rather strongly that anyone who would suggest putting a rogue corporation to death is clearly a commie or an anarchist or something red. (aren't reds republicans now?)

But holding the corporation responsible for its actions is really just a beginning. We really need to examine this idea that corporations and capitalism are one.

Monday, April 25, 2005

Glacial Creeps

PARIS -- Scientists have issued a fresh warning about the effect of climate changeon Antarctica, saying that more than 200 coastal glaciers are in retreat because of higher temperatures.

Of the 244 marine glaciers that drain inland ice on the Antarctic peninsula, a region previously identified as vulnerable to global warming, 87 percent have fallen back over the last half century, according to research by British experts.

Using 2,000 aerial photos dating back to the late 1940s and 100 satellite pictures, experts from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) compiled a record of glacier-ice shelves and tidewater glaciers along the peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts 800 kilometers (500 miles) northwards out of continental Antarctica.

Glacier-ice shelves are floating glaciers on the shoreline that are still connected to the land glaciers from which they flowed.

Tidewater glaciers rest on rock and break off into the ocean when they reach the water's edge.

Over the last half century, during which time regional temperatures have risen by around 2 C (3.6 F), these glacier fronts have reversed direction, the authors note in a study published on Friday in the US weekly journal Science.

Antarctica, the fifth largest continent in the world, contains more than 90 percent of the world's ice, most of it above sea level.

If even a small part of this cap melts, rising sea levels could drown low-lying island states, cities and deltas.

I still know people who think that Climate Change is based on models.

They like to debunk the science by saying that the system is too complicated to be modeled. I even had one former utility executive tell me that because they weren't able to model the pollution flows in the Houston Ship Channel successfully, modeling the effect of CO2 in the environment was impossible.

This is the equivalent of saying,

Because I was not able to make the football team,nobody can make the football team.

Another utility executive, who is now in charge of building a coal plant,

Broekhoven crossed the United States to visit the people portrayed in Berman's photos. In detail, they recount what happened on the day they got injured; how they arrived back home, blind or legless; how they have to try to forget the war now, in small towns around Alabama and Pittsburgh, or in Washington and L.A.

Officially recognised as “heroes,” a Purple Hearton the uniform in the closet, most of these soldiers long to go back to an army that has no use for them anymore.

The first one minute, fifty seconds are in Dutch, the remainder is in English.

Friday, April 22, 2005

Earth Day

On April 22, 1970, 20 million people across America celebrated the first Earth Day. It was a time when cities were buried under their own smog and polluted rivers caught fire. Now 35 years later, Earth Day is being celebrated around the globe. Through the combined efforts of the U.S. government, grassroots organizations, and citizens like you, what started as a day of national environmental recognition has evolved into a world-wide campaign to protect our global environment.

Somehow I prefer this from Dennis Hayes, the national coordinator of the first Earth Day and the coordinator of the first International Earth Dayin 1990.

Reclaiming the Vision of the First Earth DaySeattle TimesThursday, April 22, 2004by Denis Hayes

On the first Earth Day in 1970, 25 million people joined around the country to demand a safer, cleaner and healthier world, starting with the deplorable condition of many of their own neighborhoods.

Community activists articulated our collective outrage that day across the country. Charles Hayes, an African-American union leader who went on to represent one of the nation's poorest districts in Congress for 10 years, addressed a huge Chicago rally that day. "What we are discovering is that when poisons are thrown into the air by the steel mills, power plants and oil refineries, it is not just the workers in the plants, or the poor living in the shadow of the plants, who must breathe these poisons. It is all of us."

Freddie Mae Brown of Black Survival, in St. Louis, eloquently argued that the biggest environmental issues in her neighborhood were rats and lead paint.

Arturo Sandoval of La Raza told an Albuquerque Earth Day conference that "the humanity in all of us is being oppressed and destroyed by the very systems that we created to try to help us make life a little easier — to make it a little better."

You never see Hayes or Brown or Sandoval in the media's sepia-toned photos of the first Earth Day. Our collective memory is populated with white college professors, student radicals and dusty-footed flower children. Yet, thousands of events across the country were multi-hued and focused on a broad range of real-life issues: freeways dissecting neighborhoods; factories without pollution controls; tailpipes making our biggest cities unlivable.

Earth Daywas also intensely political. Congress adjourned for the day — a Wednesday — so that members could go home and listen to their constituents. Some listened better than others.

When Earth Day's organizers targeted the re-election of the "dirty dozen congressmen" that fall, seven were defeated and every American politician took note.

The impact of that first Earth Day was astonishing. In rapid succession, and with huge majorities, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and Superfund. Our anti-environment president, Richard Nixon, felt compelled to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

Thirty-four years later, our air is cleaner, our rivers no longer catch fire, the Great Lakes are returning to life and the bald eagle is no longer endangered.

However, the "movement" today is neither as strong nor as inclusive as it set out to be.

President Bush sees political value in trashing the environment — locally, nationally and globally. His anti-environmental policies generate huge campaign contributions, and his top political aides are convinced that the environmental movement lacks the muscle to force him to pay a price.In truth, the environmental movement has been playing defense for the past three years, and it has been losing more often than it has been winning.

Environmentalists would be wise to discard the elitist values that characterize some green groups and reach out again to the original coalition of working people and poor people who stood together on that first Earth Day. Not just for this election, but from this day forward.

Childhood asthma rates are skyrocketing. In polluted parts of Harlem, more than a quarter of all children now have asthma, and the American Lung Association reports that asthma is now the leading chronic illness among children.

Many schools are in such desperate need of repair that they are an actual threat to our children's health and ability to learn. Shrinking school budgets mean that buildings are cleaned less frequently and ventilation systems are poorly maintained. Dust and mold build up, triggering asthma and allergies.

A lack of parks and a surplus of fast-food outlets in low-income areas have led to an epidemic of obesity. Nationally, the rate of obesity among American school-age children has doubled since 1980, from 8 percent to 16 percent.

The first Earth Day defined "the environment" as literally everything that surrounds us. We eat the environment. We drink the environment. We breathe the environment. In 1970, Earth Day included eagles and pesticides, but it went beyond those issues to talk about the overall quality of life. It was concerned with the health, diversity and resilience of all living things, including Homo sapiens.

We can and must reclaim that vision. By flexing our collective political muscle we can once again work together to fulfill that original promise to change the world. As it did 34 years ago, Earth Day can again provide common ground for all of us and find common cause with the people who live and work in those communities most at risk.

Together, we can redefine the environmental movement as one founded on the belief that all of us deserve the same opportunity to live in healthy communities and are entitled to the same basic human rights.

Every part of all this soil is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hollowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust you now stand on responds more willingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.

La Bomba

We huddled round a square,Turquoise 45 record playerand listened again, and again,and again, and againto Ritchie Valens rocking out in Spanish,pushed against plasticto slow down the record.

Ears flat to the speaker,we listened for cuss words tangled up in wild rhythmsand incomprehensible words — “There!” we’d stop and play it backwards, forwards, finding --who knows what we found.

We didn’t know it was a huapango, a folk dance, fullof nonsense and revolution, like las calaveras, the skeleton rhymes sent round on el dia de los muertos, saying the mayor died choking on a cardboard taco, the priest tripped over his third leg -- and died, or thegovernor and a goat died -- stealing our vote.

We fell in love with the revolution in La Bamba —more radical than the Chicago DJ, Dick Bionti,who told everyone to take a bathat the same time one Saturday nite,which meant something besides “bath”but not to us, not yet,and we had no idea what a revolution was.

But we played La Bamba over and over again,and again, and again, la, ba, la, ba, la ba Bambaand we danced, and danced.You couldn’t play it just once.You had to get up and dance, dance andlaugh at everyone making up bla bambajiberish with cuss words tucked in.

So decades laterI can't take my eyes off Lou Diamondplaying Richie Valens.The acting sucks, the but music —I'll watch, and watch again until the song comes

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Presswhich since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Heliohydrogen

Earlier in my solar career, I was the publisher and editor of a solar magazine called Spectra.

We thought the name was cool because spectra is plural for spectrum and somehow we thought that communicated our uniqueness. We were handling the entire spectra of solar energy, from old solar like fossil fuels, to wind, water, biomass, and recyling. The magazine was actually more like a book. It had a perfect bind on it and it was shaped like a national geographic magazine.

We ran an article called heliohydrogen in it in Volume VI..

It said,

Researchers at Texas A and M University reported recently that they have developed the basic technology to use water to make hydrogen fuel as cheap as gasoline, perhaps for as little as $1.00 for the equivalent of a gallon.

The new advance, for the first time allowing hydrogen production at a rate considered practical for commercial development, is based on the simultaneous creation by two young scientists of a photo-cathode and photo-anode to electrochemically split water molecules.

Electrochemist Dr. John Bockris, who heads the Texas A & M Hydrogen Research Center, called the events a "real breakthrough" and said the potential applications are "immense" for a pollution free fuel.

The story continues

Conventional automobiles require only a few modifications-primarily a fuel injection system, turbocharger and storage tank- in order to run on hydrogen, explained Bockris, who has carried out hydrogen research for six years. He came to Texas A & M in 1978.

Wait a minute, is that a typo?

No it's not a typo. This particular edition of Spectra magazine is almost 24 years old.

Tiny porphyrin tubes developed by Sandia may lead to new nanodevicesResearch could result in clean, inexpensive hydrogen fuel

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That's a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories. The research has captured the interest of chemists around the world pursuing methods of producing hydrogen from water.

"The broad objective of the research is to design and fabricate new types of nanoscale devices," says John Shelnutt, Sandia research team leader. "

This investigation is exciting because it promises to provide fundamental scientific breakthroughs in chemical synthesis, self-assembly, electron and energy transfer processes, and photocatalysis. Controlling these processes is necessary to build nanodevices for efficient water splitting, potentially enabling a solar hydrogen-based economy."

Shelnutt says the nanodevice could efficiently use the entire visible and ultraviolet parts of the solar spectrum absorbed by the tubes to produce hydrogen, one of the Holy Grails of chemistry.

These nanotube devices could be suspended in a solution and used for photocatalytic solar hydrogen production. "Once we have functional nanodevices that operate with reasonable efficiency in solution, we will turn our attention to the development of nanodevice-based solar light-harvesting cells and the systems integration issues involved in their production," Shelnutt says. mailto:jasheln@sandia.gov

In the Solar Hydrogen Economy, we must crack water into hydrogen and oxygen using wind, hydropower, and solar power. Wind power is there. Hydropower is there. (but limited).

Solar power with photon to electron conversion materials is getting there with power paintsand nanoantenaes. Using nuclear powerto make hydrogen is nothing short of stupidity or some kind of cultural death wish.

But these kind of heliohydrogen techniques where hydrogen is created by the action of a submerged silicon photo-cathode and a photo-anode , or with these light harvesting nanodevices that operate in solution may, in fact, be the solution to the creation of affordable large scale production of heliohydrogen.

And, there is strong evidence that living creatures can also provide commercial hydrogen from the sun.

Researchers have found a metabolic switch in algae that allows the primitive plants to produce hydrogen gas -- a discovery that could ultimately result in a vast source of cheap, pollution-free fuel.

Hydrogen, which can be used as a clean-burning fuel in cars and power plants, is virtually limitless in availability, because it is part of the water molecule. It is a candidate to become the world's primary fuel in coming decades.

But until now, it was obtainable in quantity only through relatively expensive extraction procedures involving the electrolysis of water or processing natural gas.

The breakthrough, by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and the U.S. Department of Energy, would make possible the commercial production of hydrogen gas by photosynthesis in tanks, ponds or the open ocean.

``I guess it's the equivalent of striking oil,'' said Tasios Melis, a microbial biology professor at UC Berkeley. ``It was enormously exciting. It was unbelievable.''

Texas A & M, Sandia National Labs, the University of California, the US Department of Energy all seem to know how to make cheap hydrogen from water with solar energy.

And remember, hydrogen from wind power is already competitive with 2.00 gasoline.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

The Missing Strategy

I don't know whether to slit my wrist, puke, or be guardedly optimistic. Since, I can't do them all at once and my housekeeper is gone, I guess I'll do the last one. Any breathing, thinking humanoid with above convention room temperature IQ, and who is paying the least bit of attention to anything else besides the schlock a rama talking head dribble drone which oozes from the polished pores of our media outlets, often represented to be news and information, knows that Climate Changeand Peak Oilare about to make our little time on this planet an extinction footnoteto what the geological folks like to call a period, or at best an age.

So yesterday, we get this editorialfrom the NYT.The Missing Energy StrategyThe New York TimesApril 19, 2005

The House is moving quickly and with sad predictability toward approval of yet another energy bill heavily weighted in favor of the oil, gas and coal industries. In due course the Senate may give the country something better.

But unless Mr. Bush rapidly elevates the discussion, any bill that emerges from Congress is almost certain to fall short of the creative strategies needed to confront the two great energy-related issues of the age: the country's increasing dependency on imported oil, and global warming, which is caused chiefly by the very fuels the bill so generously subsidizes.

It closes with:

Changing the way this country produces and uses energywill require a determined national effort organized by the president, but Mr. Bush, so far, has been content to remain at the rear of a parade he ought to be leading. It will also require a far more adventurous approach from a Congress whose solicitude for special interests has greatly exceeded its concern for the national interest.

When I read that today, I thought, man, that's pretty mean.

Congress whose solicitude for special interests has greatly exceeded its concern for the national interest.

Now solicitude sounds worse than it is. The first definition is "concern and consideration, especially when expressed." So Congress whose concern and consideration, especially when expressed for special interests has greatly exceeded its concern for the national interest.

That sounds to me like they should be fired.

Now, these words did not come from the Village Voice.

Nor did they come from some backwater publication that just doesn't understand the big picture.The editorial even says its angry,

"What's maddening about this is that there is no shortage of ideas about what to do,"

The consensus on the need for a more stable energy future is matched by an emerging consensus on how to get there. In the last two years, there have been three major reports remarkable for their clarity and convergence, from the Energy Future Coalition, a group of officials from the Clinton and the first Bush administrations; the Rocky Mountain Institute, which concerns itself with energy efficiency; and, most recently, the National Commission on Energy Policy, a group of heavyweights from academia, business and labor.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Earthfamily Needs

Wouldn't it be really cool, if you had the most advanced cell phone in the world in your possession.

And wouldn't it be cool if this cell phone was actually a communicator, camera, GPS, blackberry and whatever else.

And wouldn't it be neat if you flipped it open and said "operator" and immediately you were in touch with your personal earthfamilyalpha operator.

"Yes OZ."

"I need a lift to 54th and L.""Car, Taxi, or Public"."Taxi""Done. Yellow. 2 minutes""Thanks.""Anything else.""Yes, pick me up in 50 minutes and get me to London tonight.""Working."Wouldn't it be great if you had someone to call who would take care of your transportation needs like a personal secretary, but infinitely better, because this transportation service knows where every rent car, every cab, every bus, and every plane in the world is all the time. And since the operator knows your position, it can dispatch a cab or coop car to your coordinate without a blink

And wouldn't it be great if your operator knew where every hotel room is, and the availability of every earthfamily room and apartment in any city of any geographic state. I guess it's a little like the operator in Matrix, except you don't have to deal with Mr. Smith.

Why do we leave ourselves all alone in this jungle of corporate predators and government agents? Why don't we protect ourselves?

Because we haven't created the entity that can provide that protection.

It has every product, every service, all the entertainment, all the movies, all the music, all the food, all the maps, all the legal services, all the computer support you will need. It is an "On Star" on steroids. It is your data central. You and your other Earthfamily members can trade and barter inside the earthfamily system.

In the Earthfamily, you don't run out of money.

Your Earthfamily Bank Card will work in any ATM all the time.

In the Earthfamily, you don't spend your life trying to make money.

You live your life like a human being who is in a very big powerful family.

Think about it.

Didn't some part of you always wish you were part of big powerful family.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Earthfamilyalpha Content

Earthfamilyalpha Plans

"Could a media system, controlled by a few global corporations with the ability to overwhelm all competing voices, be able to turn lies into truth?..."

Director Robert Kane Pappas’ "Orwell Rolls In His Grave" is the consummate critical examination of the Fourth Estate, once the bastion of American democracy. Asking whether America has entered an Orwellian world of doublespeak where outright lies can pass for the truth, Pappas explores what the media doesn’t like to talk about: itself..

There is a prophecy that arose in Tibetan Buddhism over 12 centuries ago. I learned it from my Tibetan friends in India when, in 1980, I heard many of them speaking of this ancient prophecy as coming true in our time. The signs it foretold, they said, are recognizable now, in our generation. Since this prophecy speaks of a time of great danger - of apocalypse - I was, as you can imagine, very interested to find out about it.There are varying interpretations of this prophecy. Some portray the coming of the kingdom of Shambhala as an internal event, a metaphor for one's inner spiritual journey independent of the world around us. Others present it as an entirely external event that will unfold in our world independent of what we may choose to do or what our participation may be in the healing of our world. A third version of the prophecy was given to me by my friend and teacher Choegyal Rinpoche of the TashiJong community in northern India.There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. In this era, great barbarian powers have arisen. One is in the Western Hemisphere and one in the center of the Eurasian land mass. Although these two powers have spent their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that lay waste our world. In this era, when the whole future of sentient life seems to hang by the frailest of threads, the kingdom of Shambhala begins to emerge.You can't go there, for it is not a place, it is not a geopolitical entity. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors - that is the term Choegyal used, "warriors." Nor can you recognize a Shambhala warrior when you see her or him, for they wear no uniform, or insignia, and they carry no banners. They have no barricades on which to climb to threaten the enemy, or behind which they can hide to rest or regroup. They do not even have any home turf. Always they must move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.Now the time comes when great courage - moral and physical - is required of the Shambhala warriors, for they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power, into the pits and pockets and citadels where the weapons are kept to dismantle them. To dismantle weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where decisions are made.The Shambhala warriors have the courage to do this because they know that these weapons are manomaya. They are "mind-made." Made by the human mind, they can be unmade by the human mind. The Shambhala warriors know the dangers that threaten life on Earth are not visited upon us by any extraterrestrial powers, satanic deities, or preordained evil fate. They arise from our own decisions, our own lifestyles, and our own relationships.So in this time, the Shambhala warriors go into training. When Choegyal said this, I asked, "How do they train?" They train, he said, in the use of two weapons. "What weapons?" I asked, and he held up his hands in the way the lamas hold the ritual objects of bell and dorje in the lama dance.The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary, he said. You have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion to move. When you open to the pain of the world you move, you act. But that weapon by itself is not enough. It can burn you out, so you need the other - you need insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. With that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between good guys and bad guys, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. With insight into our profound interrelatedness, you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern. By itself, that insight may appear too cool, too conceptual, to sustain you and keep you moving, so you need the heat of the compassion. Together, within each Shambhala warrior and among the warriors themselves, these two can sustain us as agents of wholesome change. They are gifts for us to claim now in the healing of our world.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Gharwar Gone

My Mother's husband was in the pipeline business in the Mid East for many years, engineering some of the greatest pipelines in the area. He lived in Saudi Arabia for the better part of 20 years back in the 70s and 80s.

He has all kinds of things to show for it. He has the best Persian Rug collection this side of Alli Baba and he has all other manner of brick a brack. He even has an old wine bottle with oil in it. The oil in the bottle is from Gharwar. It sits on his library shelf, as if it is of legend.

And, in fact, it is legendary.

Gharwar is sort of mythical in the oil and gas world.

It quite literally is the King of the Oil Fields.

In 1975, it was believed to have 60 billion barrels of recoverable reserves and perhaps a total of 170 billion barrels total. That is 6% of the whole world's reserves. Some say it represents 12% of the world reserves. It produces about 5 million barrels a day which is more than 6 % the world's daily production. This one field alone has accounted for 60% of the all the oil produced in Saudi Arabia.

Bank says Saudi's top field in declineBy Adam Porter in Perpignan, FranceTuesday 12 April 2005,

Speculation over the actual size of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves is reaching fever pitch as a major bank says the kingdom's - and the world's - biggest field, Gharwar, is in irreversible decline.

The Bank of Montreal's analyst Don Coxe, working from their Chicago office, is the first mainstream number-cruncher to say that Gharwar's days are fated.

Coxe uses the phrase 'Hubbert's Peak' to describe the situation. This refers to the seminal geologist M King Hubbert, who predicted the unavoidable decline of oilfields back in the 1950s.

"The combination of the news that there's no new Saudi Light coming on stream for the next seven years plus the 27% projected decline from existing fields means Hubbert's Peak has arrived in Saudi Arabia," says Coxe, referring to data compiled by the International Energy Association's (IEA) August 2004 monthly report.

The Canadian bank is the latest in a line of oil opinion-makers to speak out about it. Others, notably banker Matt Simmonsand the head of the Association for the study of Peak Oil (Aspo), Colin Campbell, have called into question the validity of its stated reserves, supposedly 258 billion barrels.

If Gharwar, the world's biggest field, is seen to be "in decline", as Coxe says, the effects could be problematic. Markets could panic, forcing prices up, creating shortages and profoundly affecting the world economy.

"The kingdom's decline rate will be among the world's fastest as this decade wanes," predicts Coxe. "Most importantly, Hubbert's Peak must have arrived for Gharwar, the world's biggest oilfield."And then there is this interview for Global Public Media with Chris Skrebowski, author of the important Oilfields Megaprojects Report for the UK Petroleum Review explaining why 2005 will be a critical year for global oil.

The end of the interview says this:

JD: In the light of much evidence, and in the light of your report, do you think that Ken Deffeyes’ suggestion of Thanksgiving 2005 being the time of peak, is too bold in your opinion?

CS: No, that is entirely possible. We're now into, you know, a sort of unknown land. We haven't been in this situation before. I don't think we know quite how to analyse it. We're taking traditional, fairly conventional analysis. And we're saying let's see what happens when we do this. And I suppose the rough answer we get is that from this year on it looks difficult to get it to add up comfortably. It certainly looks as though after about 2008 it really doesn't add up. But it's not quite clear what more you can say.

Perhaps the best presentation of Gharwar and the Saudi Oil situation comes from Matthew Simmons who gave this presentationto The Center for Strategic and International Studies about a year ago.

With this article both I and the FTW family will never again think in terms of whom we might offend or what bridges we need to build, burn or fireproof. As Don Henley wrote in a song of profound spiritual gratitude, "Sometimes you get your best light from a burning bridge." I'm going to burn a few with this essay.

Peak Oil is no longer on the way. It is here. Forget for a moment whether or not global oil production has actually begun (see below) its hopelessly irreversible decline. We will not know that for certain until sometime after it happens. The political fact, however, is that global inertia in response to Peak has driven our species, all of it, past the point of no return. There is no changing course for us. We have committed to a path of bloody destruction that can no longer be postponed or evaded. Energy investment banker Matthew Simmons - long a smoke alarm for Peak Oil - has said repeatedly, "The problem is that the world has no Plan B."

Simmons is right.

As the evidence grows stronger that we are at Peak now (or very close to it), there is a distinct correlation between oil price hikes and military budget increases, weapons deployment, warfare and covert operations around the world. Economists don't consider such things so they don't report on them. Their orthodoxy scorns any integrated view of world developments outside their own discipline.

For long-time readers of FTW I need do little more than discuss a few recent developments to put this in perspective. For the rest I will provide you with some of a great many available dots you can connect if you care to. Most people find themselves unable to tolerate the sight of the pattern which the connected dots reveal.

After this, FTW will no longer try to detail the dots of Peak Oil. What we have published over the last seven years is proof enough. We had it right. I refuse to go over it again. Those who get it now, get it. Those who do not may possibly be beyond saving, because their own choices have deprived them of critical months of preparation for the crisis - especially since most of this "preparation" is psychological in nature.

It is very hard and very painful to get one's mind to accept this reality.